Where The Newspaper Stands

Gov. Mark Warner completed his yearlong chairmanship of the National Governors Association last month and, by all accounts, acquitted himself well.

It's rare for a single-term governor to chair the NGA, and Warner used his opportunity to focus on high school reform and Medicaid.

In two words -- education and Medicaid -- you can sum up the principal fiscal challenges to America's 50 states. In the case of education, you want to make sure you get something for what constitutes the states' largest expenditure. With Medicaid, it's often a matter of caring for the vulnerable and elderly while not breaking the state treasury.

"Redesigning the American High School" is the label Warner gave his education initiative, and the idea was to better match public instruction to the needs of the marketplace. Nothing terribly original about that, but past efforts have been notably unproductive.

"Now we've got governors thinking about how to help all students meet existing standards for high school," the governor says, "while increasing the opportunities they have to take challenging courses that lead to either college credit or industry certification."

Of course, this is not about getting states to march in lockstep. States do not work that way, even when it might be a good idea. Instead, Warner pursued a compact between key education stakeholders and states that would provide some common definitions -- benchmarks for comparing progress among states.

You know, simple things, like dropout and graduation rates, for which there is no valid tracking system in place.

So for the first time, the states will share a common definition for their graduation rates. The governors hope to broaden the principle to include linked "data systems across the entire education pipeline from preschool through post-secondary education."

That's no small thing, given the tendency of elected officials these days to confront every social challenge with a public relations campaign. Hard facts, facts no one can ignore, can help counter spin and perhaps provide some incentive to do better.

"Our ultimate goal is that all students graduate from high school -- and graduate ready for college and work," David P. Driscoll, Massachusetts commissioner of education, told the governors. "But to do that we must first understand the scope and nature of the dropout problem, as well as how effectively high school systems are performing and serving students."

Hope springs eternal.

For Medicaid, the problems are even more profound. This is the program that now threatens to draw more money out of state coffers than education. Warner and his fellow governors yearn to exert more influence over Medicaid -- a system that has morphed into the nation's long-term, health-care safety net -- and rein in its growing demands.

There's bipartisan support for reforming Medicaid, including getting beneficiaries to pay more out-of-pocket costs. Sharing the costs will put an additional burden on the poor and frail, but the governors appear intent on imposing some market principles on the program.

They say, for instance, that Medicaid rules have not been updated since 1982 and that there's little or no incentive on the part of beneficiaries to exercise personal responsibility.

A two-part series in The New York Times confirms as well that the Medicaid program has been brutally exploited by providers in some states -- billions of dollars have been siphoned off the New York program alone through fraud, waste and profiteering -- and that safeguards to protect Medicaid from the unscrupulous are clearly inadequate.

Warner makes no claim to have figured the Medicaid dilemma out, but he has made use of the governors association to sound the alarm and unify his colleagues with bipartisan resolve to not allow the Medicaid situation to get worse.

The governors also do not want Congress to cut spending and leave the states holding the bag.

Stay tuned on this one. What turn Medicaid takes has huge implications for what has become an entitlement program with no limits on its appetite. *

Got ice?

A new way for cell phones to aid in emergencies

The Daily Press did a short story about it last week. Listeners of "The Tom Joyner Morning Show" on Norfolk's KISS-FM 105.3 heard all about it. WAVY-TV 10 weighed in with a report on it, and so did The Washington Post.

"It" is ICE.

Only in this instance it has nothing to do with keeping cool. ICE stands for "in case of emergency." And to ICE your cell phone means to put in the address book the name and number of someone to contact in case of an emergency. For example, ICE-Mom or ICE-Bob or ICE-Wife.

The ubiquitousness of cell phones offers a great way of providing emergency information for police, paramedics or other rescue personnel. The idea's origin -- according to bloggers, forwarded e-mail and then mainstream media's reporting -- is traced to a British paramedic who was frustrated about not knowing how to contact next of kin. The campaign started in the United Kingdom earlier this year and was widely used after the bombings last month in London.

ICE has now hopped the Atlantic, and law enforcement officials and emergency personnel have weighed in with endorsements along the lines of, "Hmm, that's not a bad idea."

One could even say it's a good idea. And while we're on the topic of cell phones and good ideas, here are just a few more:

Turn them off in restaurants.

Turn them off in movie theaters.

And -- so you're less likely for someone to need that ICE entry -- don't use them while you're driving. *